current state of support for sound file samplers in Safari?

kbmcgowan

Hello! Thank you again for the wonderful set of tools that make up OpenSesame. I am moving a speech perception study online. I have everything working on mindprobe.eu for all but Safari.

I believe I've read all of the relevant discussions in the forum about audio support in Safari and the permissions/click issue. And I infer from one of those discussions that the loading screen in an OSWeb experiment, the one users have to click on to continue, was meant, at least in part, to allow the software to preload sound samplers and force an interaction with the user to allow sounds to work later in the experiment. Is that correct?

Question: is there anything at all I can/should be doing in my OSWeb experiment to allow sound on Safari these days? Safari on Mac seems to be ~ 11% of browser market share these days and I'd hate to exclude them.

(I currently have an Experiment Loop with a long list of wav files and a Sampler object in that loop that presents each file. I'm willing to implement differently, of course, if it will enable Safari's draconian audio permissions)

thank you for any help!

Kevin

sebastiaan

Hi @kbmcgowan ,

The latest version of OSWeb, either 1.4.14 (for OpenSesame 3.3) or 2.0.0 (for OpenSesame 4.0), should play sound also on Safari. If you update your version of OSWeb and still experience issues, could you report back here?

— Sebastiaan

kbmcgowan

Thank you for the quick reply! I upgraded to osweb extension 1.4.14.0 (as reported by the plugin and extension manager) in opensesame 3.3.14 (on Mac). The OSWeb startup screen in my experiment reports 1.4.14 under the OpenSesame icon so I'm pretty confident pip worked.

I made a little test experiment with just one sampler and a wav file and it works perfectly!

Unfortunately, my actual experiment is still silent, but I've done some debugging and it appears to be a size or number issue of some kind. If my file pool contains all 60 of my wav files (3.3 mb total), the experiment either freezes on the first sampler or proceeds properly but is silent. Safari shows the little sound indicator on the tab as if it is playing sound, but there is no sound. If I pare the file pool down to 24 files (1.3 mb) it works perfectly. At 25 files, it breaks (either refusing to load or eventually loading and proceeding silently).

I did some more debugging and made a version with 30 tiny 400ms sine wave files totalling 1.1 mb and THAT version freezes too. So it seems like maybe it's the sheer number, rather than size, of the files that matters?

sebastiaan

@kbmcgowan Ok, thanks for reporting this! It would be helpful to know what kind of error message (if any) Safari gives when this happens. Can you post the output of the "Error console" in Safari? (You may need to enable this option under Preferences.)

kbmcgowan

I wasn't seeing anything of interest in the error console. We've decided to move on without Safari support (alas), for now, but I'll come back to this in a few weeks to see if I can understand it better and provide more insight.

sebastiaan

Ok, at least it's on the radar and I'll see if I can reproduce it.